For Real

Aliens invade as her parents begin to drift apart. But this film isn’t sci-fi. It’s as real as it gets. 

For Real is an 86-minute film that holds you with deceptively simple pacing. From the composition, angles and duration of shots at the opening sequence on a platform of New Delhi Railway Station, you see a ‘normal’ family, unspoken tension just under the surface. Focusing on visual language for self-expression, the film holds its own, and as it unfolds, you see the impact of marital disquiet on the mind of a child.

The six-year-old has this idea in her head that her mummy is not happy and wants to leave home. Her real mother, she believes,  has been sent to the Orion Galaxy and this one at home is an imposter, an ‘alien’ whom she mustn’t trust or talk to. Little Shruti  is, of course, right—in that her mother does want ‘her life back’ and longs to go back ten years when she had no husband and domesticity, when she was a singer and as free as a bird.  

As a metaphor for psychological changes in children when they see their parents unhappily married or separated, the ‘alien’ idea works well, and even Steven Spielberg’s E.T. can be read as an ‘alien’ invention in a single-parent home in American suburbia. But in this film, set in the upper-class home of a successful doctor living in Delhi, the substance in the idea is not elaborated well enough. The parents are good actors (Sarita Choudhury and Adil Hussain), but the characters they play, Priya and Ravi, are  figments of the writer-director’s notion of a couple in a bad marriage.

The verbal and body language of a rocky marriage is not convincing, and director Sona Jain has let her ‘thesis’ on child psychology imbalance this and other adult relationships in the film. The kids, though, are brilliant in this movie and Zoya S Hasan as Shruti (‘Shruts’) is a rare find. For Real is not perfect, but it is a perceptive film about real things.

About The Author

Ajit Duara